Happy Thanksgiving!

Happy Thanksgiving, friends!  We were thankful to gather as a family and cook our little hearts out!  The littlest niece had several rounds of patty cake, but didn't get to mix pumpkin pie batter or whip the meringue for the chocolate pie, like her big sisters did.  

Oh, pie - how I love you.  Remember when I used to bake pies just because I could?  Since we've been trying to live this healthy life of limited carbohydrates, the annual Thanksgiving pie bake has to do me for the year.  Jamie cut the butter into the flour for all the pie dough, and even though we limited ourselves to just four pies this year, it's still a big job to make all those crusts.  

I usually accept the rustic pie crust look, but Mom took the time to carefully crimp the edges.  I think these pies were some of the prettiest we've ever made.  

We baked the pies, the sweet potatoes, and the cornbread the night before, while Home Alone played on the TV, and then the next day we baked the sweet potato casseroles and cornbread dressing as soon as the giant turkey came out of the oven.  

It wasn't all work and no play.  While the kitchen was swarming with cooks, the living room was home to intense video games!  

The table was set with room for everyone!  

Real plates and forks this year!  Plus pretty flowers in jars and candles. 

Even little turkey shaped name cards.  Fancy!

Menu: Turkey, dressing, gravy, mashed potatoes, sweet potatoes with marshmallows, green beans, corn, cranberry sauce, rolls, pumpkin pie, apple pie, and chocolate pie.  Did I forget anything? 

I think the turkey weighed twenty-seven pounds!  

I stayed true to the Thanksgiving tradition, and ate so much I was miserable.  Then I had some pie with whipped cream!

Unlike years past, I didn't bring home any leftover except turkey, which made wonderful turkey salad.  I wish I had more turkey right now! 

I made a little video of our Thanksgiving pictures.  Enjoy!

Rambling Story of Recent Things, and Then it Snowed

 Rufus has such a good kissy face!  I have some photos to share, of recent things. 

We harvested green beans.  Lots and lots of green beans.  My parents came, and we gathered round the bean harvest, and picked all the little beans from their shells so we can save them to plant next year.  The focus of the 2019 summer garden was green beans and sweet potatoes.  I did my best to harvest and eat the beans as they ripened, so by the time the last of the beans were ready to save for seeds, we were glad to take a break from stringing!  If I plant all those seeds next year, we will be covered up in green beans.  

Would you like to admire Turkey?  She's grown into a giant bird, who coos softly, and squeaks loudly for food.  She's a champion pear eater, and sleeps on the top perch with the chickens. 

Brandon and I dressed as our future selves for our Halloween costume this year.  We sprayed our hair white and grey, emphasized our wrinkles, and added age spots.  We also nearly caused a fender bender while taking selfies in the car!

We joked that the best part of going to a party at the age of one hundred and three is that we could wear our most comfortable sweaters and no one thinks it's unacceptable to take a nap during the party! 

Somehow, despite his busy schedule, Brandon managed to squeeze in enough moments to build an addition to our barn.  

 

It's a an extension of the roof line, that perfectly shelters the tractor.  I was happy to move the tractor out of the hay hoop barn, to make room for my hay bales.  Now the tractor is nearer the electricity, which is good in case we need to plug it in to warm up, should we need to use it this winter.  

Wendigo was galloping around and hurt her knee.  Her good knee.  So now she has one bad-ish knee, and one pretty bad knee, and she hobbles.  It's no wonder I tweaked my back trying to lift her into the car for a visit to the vet - she weighed in at one hundred and three pounds!  The vet took scans and said that her hips are a little bad, which probably puts pressure on her knees. She likely has tears in her ACL tendons.  Wendigo's only consolation for her limited mobility is that the pain medicine goes down easiest when embedded in hot dogs.  She doesn't mind a twice daily dose of hot dog one bit.    

The main route away from home was flooded one day last week.  I turned around to try the other route...

and it was flooded too!  It's an odd feeling to be trapped at home, but nice to have an excuse to stay home from work. 

It was past time to harvest the sweet potatoes.  The vines were so pretty all summer, but I was unconvinced there would be real potatoes under the ground.  I was wrong!  

It took me about five digging sessions, but I finally made my way through the entire bed.  I didn't have to dig too deep, as most of the potatoes were in the top layer of loose organic garden soil, and not into the clay subsoil.  Even still, it was a lot of work and I couldn't help but dream of the giant bin of organic sweet potatoes at the grocery, all clean of dirt and harvested by someone else!  Especially when I would carefully excavate a giant whopper of a potato only to turn it over and find that some type of rodent had gnawed all the way through it!  Grrrr!  

 

Even though we shared about a third of the harvest with the voles, the other two thirds make an impressive display on the dining room table.  

My root cellaring book says to cure the potatoes for ten to fourteen days at eighty-five degrees and ninety percent humidity.  Yeah, right.  Who has a sauna fit for potato curing?  To store them after they are cured, the book says they need a relatively warm and dry root cellar, or they do well wrapped in newspaper and stored in an unheated room.   All the potatoes in the bowl have chewed places, or were damaged during harvest.  I've been cleaning them up and baking them.

Brandon prefers that I cut off the chew marks from the voles. So picky!  Ha!  Even uncured, they are delicious.  Maybe they were worth all that effort to dig, after all. 

We did all that stuff, bean harvesting, Halloween partying, barn building, dog toting, flooding, and potato digging, and then it snowed.  Nice.  

It's Nearly Time for a New Skill

Our good neighbor is growing a meat cow.  His daughter was given a little calf, so they built a pen and have been harvesting their grass with the lawn mower, and plan to butcher when the grass is gone and before the mud takes over.  We discussed the advantages of having meat on the hoof, rather than in the freezer.

My goats are a dairy breed, known for their milk production, not for meaty frames. 

Although Peaches nursed two big kids, she looks thin but strong.  Young Noobi, with her first kids this year, looks too thin to me.  I worry that she isn't in good condition, and that I should have let her grow bigger before she was allowed to breed, or I should have removed her weakest kid, the one that didn't survive anyway, so she didn't use up so much of her fat stores nursing.  

To manage parasites, I give the goats cookies made with wormwood, garlic, and black walnut herbs, and for Noobi, Nibs, and Little Buck, the thinnest goats in the herd, I recently dosed them with a chemical wormer too.  Some people say to routinely dose the whole herd with chemicals, but others say to only dose those goats that need it, so as not to create worms that are resistant to the chemicals.  Our small pastures have been grazed pretty short, so the goats are surely being exposed to more worms than ever before.    

It's easier to think of culling some of the herd when faced with the dangers of overgrazed pastures and parasite problems.    Goats are fun to keep unless they are sick.  

We've grown accustomed to caring for chickens that are destined for the freezer, but we're still wrapping our heads and hearts around harvesting goat meat.  But, we are undeniably meat eaters, and we have surplus goats...    

It's nearly time to take the plunge and learn this new skill.

Quick Art Trip

A few weeks ago, on a Friday, I took a day off work and traveled with Brandon all the way to St. Louis and back again.  On the same day! 

We were up early to pick up a rented van, stopped for coffee and lunch on the way, and were at Fontbonne University right on time to pick up Brandon's framed drawings that had been on display in the university gallery.  The frames were wrapped in bubble wrap, and we quickly loaded them into the van, and were on our way home in no time.  

Luckily we took a wrong turn and made a scenic detour through town and got a close up view of the arch.  We made it back to Brandon's studio to unload the drawings, drop off the rental van, and then home by midnight.  Whew!  It's amazing to think of how many miles we covered in one day!  

Wendigo was glad to have us home for the weekend!  

The Lake, Not the Beach

We made camp site reservations at our old favorite - Huntington Beach in South Carolina.  We cleaned and organized all our camping and beach gear.  I researched and purchased the ultimate beach cooler.  And then there was a hurricane!  No worries, we redirected our family vacation to Lake Cumberland, here in Kentucky, and the whole crew converged on a rented lake house with my parents pontoon boat in tow.  

Even better, the family members that weren't up for a beach camping odyssey, like my newest little niece, were able to attend the family vacation now that was in a comfortable house not too far from home.  My youngest niece is only five months old, but she's excellent at vacationing!  

We were all happy to get some quality baby snuggle time. 

The house we stayed in had plenty of room, and a giant back deck perfect for star gazing, smoking meats, lounging in the sun, and tending the campfire.  The giant kitchen was perfect for cooking bacon and blueberry pancake breakfasts each morning, before we packed our coolers and headed for the sparkling water.  

We swam, rode the inter-tube, enjoyed cold Saki and lunch meat sandwiches, saw a waterfall, and visited the marina for ice cream cones and t-shirts. 

I'm happy looking nerd, right?  

Good memories were made by all!  If you would like to see the rest of our vacation photos, click the video below.  

Old Trees, Pear Eating Turkey, and Praise for Shade

We take advantage of the shade provided by our two old trees nearly every hot day.  It's a good day when I find myself sitting in their shade, sipping a tasty beverage, and admiring the view while dinner is cooking on the grill.  These two old trees protected us from the sun for years while we worked on this old house and lunched on the lawn, and more than one visiting friend has had some excitement when a tiny black beetle drops down their collar from the pears overhead.  

The old silver maple leans, and looks very dramatic with all those dead pale limbs reaching.  The dead wood on this tree goes all the way to the ground on one side, and provides habitat for mushrooms and lean brown roaches that come out at night to horrify amaze guests gathered by the campfire.  Some learned the hard way that sitting too near the tree after dark can result in a thrilling roach encounter.  

In years past the pears would fall faster than we could use them, and by this time of year the ground would be littered with bruised pears and the wasps would feast.  I think the mole must focus his worm hunting excavations under the pear tree due to the years of organic enrichment.  But this year, things are different.  We have Turkey!

Turkey, plus a dozen giant meat hens that are months beyond their freeze by date, are excellent pear clean up.  They eat every dropped pear, every day.  In the mornings there will be dozens of pears on the ground, and by the evening there are zero.  When a pear falls with a thud, Turkey comes running!  When I said to Brandon that Turkey might taste delicious because of her diet of pears, he gave me a look like I was threatening to eat the dog!  Do we have a pet turkey?  

With daily pear fruit clean up, instead of concentrating the nutrients harvested by the pear tree right at it's feet, Turkey is spreading all that good stuff around the yard.  And stockpiling it on the floor of the chicken coop, so I can put it in the garden.  She's a genius!

Occasionally we whisper about cutting the shabby old silver maple, or removing big limbs from the old pear with the hollow trunk.  Every year we put it off, and collect the fallen branches for the fire pit, and say thanks for one more summer of shade.

The little forest on the east side of the house is growing fast, and promises years of shade to come.   

Even the old locust tree near the driveway, given up for dead, has sprouted from the roots, and makes a little shadow.  It's a good place to mix cement, or for Wendigo to take a nap.